Cricket

Update - 8pm: A Current Affair has reported that Clarke has ended his relationship with Bingle. Read the news.com.au report here.

I’ve been thinking for a while now that the Australian cricket team and the huge machinery around it contained a bunch of over-paid, under-developed, spoiled brats happily trapped in a pre-feminist world, but today really tipped it over the edge for me.

It’s clear the cricket mob is not coping with the loss of the good old days when wives maintained a dignified presence at home for 10 months of the year while their husbands traveled their way around the world safely cocooned in the mantra “what goes on tour stays on tour.”

According to Peter Roebuck, Robert Craddock, Mark Waugh, and just about every other bloke with an opinion on this, Lara Bingle didn’t get the memo that it’s her job to stay at home and play a “quiet, dignified supporting role.”

Continue reading "Grown men threatened by a 22-year-old model" »

Who needs Posh ‘n’ Becks? Australian cricket vice-captain Michael Clarke and his model girlfriend Lara Bingle have confirmed themselves as the nation’s celebrity circus couple.

Clarke is known for being unhappy with the ongoing publicity that surrounds their relationship but its effect has reached a nadir with him quitting the team camp on the eve of a one-day match against New Zealand because his girlfriend was upset.

This is no Hollywood couple’s restaurant flare-up. Clarke’s sudden and stunning decision to return to Sydney to be with Bingle raises questions on his future role in the team and ability to focus on his cricket. Clarke has been a consistently excellent performer and is the favourite to succeed Ricky Ponting as captain.

Continue reading "With Pup and Lara who needs Posh and Becks?" »

The Kiwis are sputting chups this morning about John Howard being put forward for the spot of Deputy President of the International Cricket Council, with the likelihood he’ll take over the top job in 2012.

The New Zealand Herald this morning lamented: “Cricket: ‘Fan’ with no cricket experience gets top job.” The paper wondered what “Australian heavying” went on behind closed doors to secure Howard over NZC Chairman Sir John Anderson.

On AM this morning the former Prime Minister, now 70, mounted an understated defense of his credentials for the role.

“I don’t know that I have a lack of background in the game,” he said. “I don’t come to the game as having been a champion player or a previous administrator, but there aren’t too many champion players and I think most people know what I’ve been doing with my spare time up until now.”

Continue reading "Is this man qualified to run world cricket?" »

Call the RSPCA. Alert PETA. Get the anti-whaling boats to steam north from Antarctica and stop this mindless slaughter.

Cricket is on its last legs. And to think, this shocking butchery of our national sport is no longer even taking place in the name of science.

Before the summer, we suspected the opposition were crap. By mid December, we knew it. Discussion over. Yet here we are in mid February still prodding and poking at the carcasses of West Indian and Pakistani cricket.

Continue reading "Put this summer of cricket out of its misery" »

Can’t bowl, can barely bat - but could he run world cricket? Former Prime Minister John Howard may be feeling a twinge of nostalgia for his time in office today after waking to a spectacular bucketing in the morning papers.

Cricket writer Peter Roebuck said nominating Howard for president of the International Cricket Council was “as pitiful as it is disrespectful”, the logic being that the ex-PM is really just an enthusiastic follower of cricket than a leader who can think creatively about the future of the game. “Plain and simple,” writes Roebuck, “he is not qualified for the job.”

Isn’t he? Given the laundry list of problems with internal bickering in cricket’s international governing body, maybe a pragmatic politician like Howard is just what the ICC needs.

Continue reading "Can this man save cricket?" »

Let me be the first to say it: surely the entire Australian cricket team must now be awarded honorary knighthoods, or at the very least some form of membership of the British Empire.

The series win against Pakistan matches the efforts of the 2005 Ashes-winning team. Every player in that England side was awarded the MBE (the captain getting the slightly more elevated OBE) and there are now calls for Paul Collingwood to be knighted after the England all-rounder saved the third Test against South Africa this week. 

Australia’s win at the SCG came too late for the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List, but there were many worthy recipients.

Continue reading "Arise Sir Ricky, Dame Pink and Lady Lady Gaga" »

If you wanted to write a short skit to satirise the insidious fan-hating culture of cricket ground managers, what would the plot be?

How about, say, Santa Claus being ejected after skylarking with a bloke dressed in a cancer-awareness tutu? That’s surely sufficiently exaggerated to make the comical point.

Bzzt. Try harder. That’s precisely what happened at the Sydney Cricket Ground on the first day of the New Year Test.

Continue reading "Killing cricket" »

Twenty20 is like a box-office smash hit – overloaded with action, drama and emotion.

And like any blockbuster, crowds are flocking to cricket grounds to soak up the electric atmosphere of Twenty20.
There’s a saying in business that you find out what people want and you give it to them – in bigger doses.

Continue reading "Why Twenty20 will knock traditional cricket for six" »

I don’t get out much. I work from home and, generally, I sleep at home too. I seem to have lived the life of a butterfly in reverse, a few decade of delicate and delicious socialising, followed by a quite decade in my cocoon.

I’m not the only person who doesn’t get out much, mind, there’s quite a few, and in the northern hemisphere they often gather around the Guardian campfire and comment on the cricket as it happens on the OBO (over-by-over report).

Truth be told, the Guardian’s OBO isn’t just about what’s happening out on the pitch, it is like a potted philosophy of everything, with a particular preference for wit and that peculiar form of gloom that seems to descend over English cricket supporters even if they are six hundred runs ahead with two days to bowl the opposition out.

Continue reading "Real-time cricket writer who keeps the spirit of the game" »

MELBOURNE’S Boxing Day Test has a profound effect on Aussie cricketers’ form. Some batsmen thrive on the festive atmosphere and give opposing bowlers a serve on the MCG wicket.

Other batsmen – and bowlers – crumble under pressure. Some Aussies had glorious batting innings and magic spells with the ball.

It was a memorable Test, particularly as the Melbourne crowd celebrated their Test hero – Shane Watson, who redeemed himself at the crease in Australia’s 170-run win.

Continue reading "Pakistan may have lost the heart for the Sydney Test" »

HOW many Test innings have we seen fail as Aussie batsmen reach the nervous nineties?

Too many, I’d say.

Boxing Day is often a cricketer’s field of dreams - the biggest day on the Test calendar.

Continue reading "The nervous 90s are all in our heads" »

Test Cricket, it’s over between us. I’m sorry to do the Gen Z thing and break the news to you online, but you’re not coming round to my place in Sydney till January and I just can’t wait till then.

At the risk of going all George Costanza, it’s not you, it’s me, OK? You’re still the same quirky, fascinating form of the game you’ve always been. But I’ve moved on.

I’m a different person with different priorities these days, TC. The kids, the job. The desire to indulge in a little physical activity myself occasionally instead of just watching you for five days. It all leaves so little time for you.

Continue reading "A parting letter to my former love, test cricket" »

American diva Toni Braxton probably doesn’t follow the cricket.

And she almost certainly wasn’t thinking about the umpire decision review system when she sang “It’s not right, but it’s ok”. You’ve got to hand it to her though - she hit the nail on the head.

It isn’t right. Not 100 per cent.

Continue reading "Toni Braxton is right about cricket’s video referee" »

APRIL is the cruelest month, old T.S Eliot used to say, but where does that leave October?

No league, no AFL, nothing really to live for. Hell, not even club rugby on the ABC on a Saturday. There’s something called the A-League, but as far as I can make out it’s largely populated by volatile blokes with blonde highlights, either too old or mentally unstable to cut it in Europe.

As the weather warms up and the sport winds down, you begin to rediscover weekends. This is by no means a good thing. Your better half declares Friday and Saturday nights the time for “catching up with people,” time you would happily have spent watching NRL games back-to-back in the winter months.

Continue reading "October, it’s Hell on earth for sports lovers" »

Following England’s cricketers on Twitter is becoming almost as entertaining as watching them on the field.

Graeme Swann and Jimmy Anderson led the way, giving us the inside track on everything from room service meals to the perils of only packing two pairs of underpants for a tour.

Swann, in particular, went the extra mile by providing details of a stomach bug he picked up.

Continue reading "English cricketers do something right" »

As Australia’s cricketers started their colossal – and ultimately futile –chase of 546 runs for an Ashes victory at The Oval, it was accepted that the team’s only hope was for someone to play a ‘Bradmanesque’ innings.

Given that it’s more than 60 years since Sir Donald Bradman played his final Test on that same strip of dirt in south London, why is it that his name remains the benchmark against which all cricketers are still measured?

It’s because for more than a century, Test match cricket has seen Don Bradman – born 101 years ago today – separated by a colossal gap from everyone else in the game.

Continue reading "After all these years we’re yet to find another Bradman" »

Defeat at the hands of a weak English side is the wake up call that the Australian cricket hierarchy has needed.

The Australian cricket supremacy has passed. That supremacy dated from 1995, when Mark Taylor’s team defeated the then world champion West Indians in the Caribbean. 95 Test matches were won, and only 24 lost, over the following twelve years. The cricket world became accustomed to the inexorable dominance of Australia’s national side.

Now Australia has suffered series defeats to India, South Africa and England in the last twelve months.

Continue reading "No more excuses: sack the selectors and punt Ponting" »

Ricky Ponting’s shock at his team’s emphatic defeat at the hands of England in the deciding Ashes Test is revealed in his concern for his own future he expressed after the game.

“I really don’t know what to expect,” he said when asked about facing the music back in Australia. “Hopefully most of the questions being asked will be from journalists and not from people above me.”

England’s Daily Telegraph twisted the knife, pointing out that Australia was now fourth in the world rankings and that, combined with the loss of The Ashes, would be “a permanent stain” on Ponting’s career.

Continue reading "England reclaims The Ashes and twists the knife" »

And so it begins, although it seems strangely anticlimactic.  The reason for that could be because of the two week gap between matches, which was the norm until a few years ago when International tours became compressed affairs so the Test specialists could be shipped off and the one day specialists freighted in.

Now we add the Twenty 20 specialists to the mix as well, so we’re lucky they don’t run the 25 days of the 5 Tests consecutively, or play a Test during the day and a T20 fixture at night as a double header. 

We used to enjoy the fact that five Tests took five and a half months to play during which time the players would play a couple of counties between Tests, get to travel to Scotland or Ireland for a couple of beers matches on a local village green and come home in time to have a week’s rest before the first Shield game started.

Continue reading "There’s a spark missing from this Ashes series" »

It’s often said journalism is a mirror to the society it serves. Most cricket fans know which of these papers they would prefer to be reading this morning.

At the start of this Ashes series I set out 10 reasons to love the English and said at the time they would take some comfort from being classed as underdogs. But surely, the underdog tag is too kind this time. Beedogs, perhaps.

Anyway, below are some links to previews from English and Australian commentators on this deciding Test, including Shane Warne’s. But if England’s hopes rest on Andrew Flintoff playing a blinder in his final Test match and Australia are counting on Ricky Ponting, I know which side I’d prefer to be on. Share your thoughts, predictions, and sledges in the comments.

Continue reading "Ashes deciding Test: A tale of two Telegraphs" »

There’s further evidence today of the growing contempt that modern managers of sporting codes hold for fans of their games, with English cricket managers begging the crowd to be nice to Ricky Ponting when he walks to the middle in the fourth Ashes Test, getting underway at Headingley in a few hours’ time.

For a measure of how patronising and unnecessary this is, look no further than Australian batsman Shane Watson, who says the booing Ponting gets from the crowds is to be expected - and something players enjoy, even thrive on, when playing in England.

Cricket managers in Australia have shown a similar pattern of growing discomfort with what ordinary people consider a good day out. When the Poms were last here, the Barmy Army’s trumpeter was kicked out of the Gabba for playing his instrument, despite getting prior approval to blow it. (He’s been banned from the Headingley Test, too.)

Continue reading "Boo to English cricket bosses. And the Aussie ones, too" »

No Australian cricketer has scored more runs for his country than Ricky Ponting. The Tasmanian has overhauled Allan Border’s Australian run scoring record in 22 fewer Tests, with an average six runs to the good, and boasts eleven more centuries to his name.

Yet Allan Border remains the finest Australian batsman of the last quarter century.

Granted, Ponting is Border’s superior in the one day format. But it is the pure form of the game that provides the ultimate test of the abilities of cricketers. A great cricketer’s greatness is established in the Test arena.

Continue reading "Allan Border still the greatest Australian batsman" »

It’s a good thing the Aussies have their wives and girlfriends along for the Ashes tour.

Had they not been there, it’s quite probable we would have gone down to county side Northamptonshire because we’ve all been assured by Cricket Australia that the boys play better if the WAGs are in attendance.

Seeing as we have managed to win just one of the seven tour games so far, I tremor at the thought of what would have happened if CA hadn’t had the foresight to support the significant others/B-grade celebrities and female wannabes to stay with the cricketers for the first part of the Ashes.

Continue reading "WAGs aren’t about team happiness, but marketing" »

“Two world wars and one world cup” is a popular refrain from the terraces when England play Germany at football (aka soccer).  Offensive as it may be to some, the chant has been around pretty much since England’s World Cup final win over the then West Germany in 1966 and is “popular with the Neanderthal branch of the Ingerland Supporters’ Club, to be sung at Johnny Foreigner once the Channel has been safely negotiated,” according to one fan website.

The victory at Wembley was an aberration and not to be repeated. We die-hard English sports fans of the post-war era (that’s post 1966) fully understand this fact. We’re also aware that the 2005 Ashes series victory, pleasant enough entertainment but clearly an unscripted entry into the English sporting history books, would never occur again in our lifetime.

So it is with some trepidation and a sense of dismay that we watch Freddie Flintoff and the chaps once again threaten our calm state of underachieving equilibrium.

Continue reading "Proud Britons remain quietly confident of noble defeat" »

Lawrie Sawle is the most unrecognised contributor to the Australian cricket supremacy of the last two decades.

A West Australian school teacher and administrator, Sawle became Australian cricket’s chairman of selectors in late 1984. Earlier that year the Sydney Cricket Ground Test played host to the retirements of the three giants of the national team, Greg Chappell, Dennis Lillee and Rod Marsh.

Soon Australia was being beaten by everyone. The captain resigned in tears. A majority of the first Test team chosen by Sawle’s selection panel had already signed secret agreements to rat on Australian cricket and tour apartheid South Africa.

Continue reading "Australian cricket doomed if we don’t back the young" »

The monkey is not just off the back – he’s on the floor, break-dancing.

If we didn’t win this time, we would never win at Lords ever again.

For 75 years that Aussies have dominated us at the home of cricket, but by Sunday we dared to dream. A lead of more than 500, two days to bowl the Aussies out – and a bowling line-up that consisted of four seamers, one spinner and two umpires.

Continue reading "Why winning at Lords meant the world to us Poms" »

Australia last night extended the Ashes to a five-game contest by losing seven wickets to be declared all out in its second innings at Lords. The other three batsmen were dismissed off no balls, by “snicking” the ball without actually hitting it, or by being “caught” when English captain Andrew Strauss, an ornament to gamesmanship, found a cricket ball lying on the grass and shouted “howzat!”

It was the first time England had won at Lords since 1411. Anyway it’s the 40th anniversary of the moon landing today, which puts an event as trifling as a cricket match in its proper perspective. You can read about the moon in the next post. We’ve got nothing more to say.

Bumble and Aggers. Watch or listen to coverage of the Ashes from England and you will soon be familiar with these two fellows.

Both are now building a strong following on Twitter. The Ashes (sorry #ashes for Twitterers) is ideally suited to Twitter. Plenty of pauses between play, statistics-a-plenty and each moment easily encapsulated in 140 characters.
Bumble otherwise known as David Lloyd, is a regular in the Sky Sports Commentary Box – by gum, he’s the lad with the broad Lancashire accent.

Continue reading "How Bumble and Aggers tweeted their way past tea" »

Winding up Ricky Ponting threatens to overtake fishing as England’s biggest recreational sport.

From his Gary Pratt blow-up in 2005 to Sunday’s ‘Physiogate’ press conference, us Poms like nothing better than to dress up the beady-eyed Tasmanian as the pantomime villain.

It’s just so much fun to watch – Little Ricky standing there in the playground shouting, “Miss, they stole my Test match…”

Continue reading "Why Ponting the sook has given us Poms the edge" »

Most people can’t resist taking a swing at Ricky Ponting’s captaincy. Ironically, despite my menacing pose in the image below, I am not one of them.

That the bloke can bat, nobody denies. But if you buy the negative hype, then every time an opponent strikes the ball through the covers, it’s Punter’s fault because he sets poor fields.

Every time a match peters out to a tame draw, it’s Punter’s conservative declaration that’s to blame.

Continue reading "The centurion who spanked his critics out of the park" »

WHEN mounting an argument sure to rub some people up the wrong way - such as, say, listing reasons to love the English on the first day of The Ashes - it can be useful to start by invoking supporting words of wisdom from a unifying, popular figure.

Step forward, Donald Rumsfeld.

The former US Defence Secretary - not exactly of Ghandi-esque stature in global public opinion - had a favourite phrase: that America would be vindicated in “the great sweep of human history”.

In the great sweep of sporting history, the English have been the objects of increasing ridicule. They deserve much of it, especially with their tragi-comic efforts in soccer and cricket during the 1990s. But with the 2009 Ashes series beginning this evening, Australian time, we’re sure to be in for weeks of tiresome jokes about whingeing Poms, underachievers, chokers, yob fans with beer bellies, along with general mirth at moments of English failure.

When Mitchell Johnson gets the ball in hand and eyes off Andrew Strauss in Cardiff before starting his run-up, it might be worth him - and Australians everywhere - pausing for a moment to reflect on England’s place in the great sweep of human history. For England, possibly more than any other nation, deserves respect.

[More Ashes: Luke Foley on English elitists | Phil Hillyard’s photo secrets]

And as one of the 10 reasons below argues, respecting England just might help Australia win The Ashes.

Continue reading "Ten reasons to love the Poms" »

My mates would say to me “Are you serious? You’re being sent to watch every ball of The Ashes, and you call that work?” It sounds like a dream job ... and believe me it is. But a lot goes in to photographing cricket, particularly an Ashes.

I was lucky enough to be given the assignment of covering the last two Ashes series for News Limited. The 2005 tour of England and then the return battle in the Australian summer of 06/07. In 2005 we set off at the beginning of June and wouldn’t return until mid September. It was a monster of a tour, including the one-dayers it was almost a 15 week trip. And sadly, England won.

The first thing you need to be a cricket photographer is stamina. There is no other sport like it. 540 balls a day, the best part of eight hours of action, five days in a row, countless training sessions, and the series last for months on end.

Continue reading "Shooting the Ashes: 540 balls a day, and you can’t miss one" »

Tonight, a young man from New South Wales will step on to a cricket field in old South Wales. Phillip Hughes, age twenty, son of a banana farmer, will open the batting for his country in international sport’s most enduring contest, Ashes cricket.

He’s dreamt of this moment for much of his young life. One can write with some confidence that he hasn’t dreamt of playing his first Ashes Test at Sophia Gardens, rather at Lords or Headingley or Old Trafford.

The opening match of the 2009 series will be the first Ashes Test played on neutral soil. That is, it will take place neither in England nor Australia, but in a foreign country, Wales.

The first Welshman to captain England at Test cricket, Tony Lewis, wrote of Sophia Gardens, ‘a day watching there when the prevailing wind blows is like a week at sea’.

Continue reading "England’s toffy cricket elite keeps the crowds at bay" »

Leggies. Googlymen. Chinamen. Mystery spinners. Australia chooses spin bowlers to take wickets, not merely to tie up an end.

Until now, that is. Andrew Hilditch, the chairman of Australia’s selection panel, recently enlightened us on his view of the role of spin bowling in Australia’s forthcoming Ashes campaign.

“The word attacking is a bit overrated really”, he declared. “...it’s about asserting pressure and performing the role the captain wants…Nathan (Hauritz, the only specialist spinner chosen) did that very well in the times he’s played, because we wanted to tie up an end, assert pressure from that end, keep pressure on batsmen and relieve the fast bowlers.”

Continue reading "Australia’s real crisis of spin is on the cricket pitch" »

Former Australian cricket team national coach John Buchanan is leaving his wooden spoon IPL franchise, the Kolkata Knight Riders.

This was no surprise to the cricket fraternity, not least former leg spinner and noted wine buff Stuart MacGill, who’d heard on the cricketing grapevine that Buchanan’s departure was a near certainty.

Buchanan’s main critic down the years has been Shane Warne. But it’s the thinking man’s leggie, MacGill, who’s unleashed the most stinging criticism yet of Buchanan, in the July issue of Alpha magazine.

Continue reading "Time to radically re-evaluate the Buchanan legacy" »

Here is a question for your cricket club’s next trivia night. Name England’s Test all rounders between Botham and Flintoff - that is, over the fifteen year period from the 1986/87 Ashes, the scene of both Ian Botham’s last century and his final five wicket haul in an innings, to 2001/02, when Flintoff made the spot his own.

Chris Lewis may spring to mind, if only on account of last month’s conviction and thirteen year prison sentence for cocaine smuggling.

Lewis’ most memorable cricketing performance involved shaving his scalp, taking the field bare headed and coming down with sunstroke on England’s 1994 tour of the West Indies -  destined to be known evermore, courtesy of The Sun, as “the prat without a hat”.

Continue reading "There’s only one Ian Botham: selectors still living in past" »

UPDATED: Trouble follows him off the field like the ball does on it. It’s a shame because it’s a waste of talent and a let-down for cricket fans. There are few players better to watch when he starts tonking. There’s video below of the brilliance we now won’t be seeing in the Twenty20 World Cup, because Andrew Symonds has been sent home for breaking team rules.

Cricket Australia is booking his flights tonight. Precisely what happened is yet to emerge but it appears, as is usually the case when Symonds gets in trouble, there’s booze involved. Bizarrely it sounds like Symonds hasn’t repeated anything like turning up for a match drunk, like he did in 2005. CA boss James Sutherland said tonight: “the breaches that I am talking about are not serious, but in the scheme of things, in the scheme of history, they are enough for it to be the final straw”.

Twitter exploded with reaction after the story broke, and I guess the widespread disappointment shows the generally high regard in which Symonds is held, and the fact that people want him to come good.

I particularly liked this, from @KristinByrne:

Andrew Symonds: the only fun thing about cricket.

Anyway, Roy, as he’s known, wasn’t in the Ashes squad but he would have been a key player in the Twenty20 side. This might be the end of his international career. But how many chances should players like Symonds get?

Cricket’s foremost nineteenth century moralist the Reverend James Pycroft published his famous treatise The Cricket Field in 1851. He recalled a shocking chapter in the game’s history – the presence of bookmakers at cricket matches:

“They had all sorts of tricks to make their betting safe. ‘One artifice,’ said Mr. Ward, ‘was to keep a player out of the way by a false report that his wife was dead.’”

Continue reading "Tons of tedium on pitches watered with bowlers’ tears" »